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Starring Harrison Ford, Anne Heche. Released to DVD on December 8, 1998.  Helen Hunt, Cindy Crawford, Leona Helmsley, Michael McCaskey, and the Grim Reaper are just some of the people with whom I would rather be stranded on a tropical island than Anne Heche, judging from the near constant screaming and complaining she displa.html>spla.html>spla.html>spla.html>splayed on screen in Six Days Seven Nights. Frankly with all her tantrums and nagging, I was surprised to see that Harrison Ford didn't throw her off a cliff any sooner than he did. Directed by Ivan Reitman, Six Days Seven Nights is probably the most disappointing comedy I have seen since Reitman's last picture, Father's Day. I watched Ford, star of both the Indiana Jones trilogy and the Stars Wars trilogy, and just couldn't fathom his involvement with this picture. The script, written by first timer Michael Browning, is older and moldier than any number of tangerines I've got in the back of my refrigerator, and the character development as non-existent as talent in a Pauly Shore film. Ford plays Quinn, an American pilot eeking out a living in the South Seas on an island in the near vicinity of Tahiti. He has a rusting hunk of metal he calls a plane, a shanty he calls his house, and a large-chested Tahitian woman whom he can call, should he want a girlfriend. Ford meets Heche and her fiancé, David Schwimmer, as he flies the two New Yorkers to their vacation spot on the island on which he, just coincidentally, also lives. Out of the blue, Heche gets a call from her boss telling her that she is needed to supervise a photo shoot. Ford agrees to fly Heche to the shoot, and while en route, Ford's flying coffin is stuck by lightening and the two are forced to crash land on a deserted tropical island. Then they witness a murder, are chased by modern day pirates, and generally speaking, annoy the hell out of each other, before falling head over heels in love with each other. Reitman has never been accused of directing cutting-edge comedy like the Zucker Abrahams Zucker gang, or the Farrelly brothers, but the enormous amount of recycled material in Six Days Seven Nights was particularly appalling. What especially frustrated me was Randy Edelman's almost offensively stereotypical score for the film. As we were introduced to the dopey, neurotic, supposedly lovable Schwimmer (is there any other kind?) and Heche in New York, the accompanying orchestrations, while not exactly earth-shatteringly creative, were pleasant background music and unassuming. However, the minute Heche and Schwimmer set foot on Tahiti, the style of music changed to that of a calypso variety, with prominently featured steel drums and riffs that would have felt cheap and touristy in any number of Jimmy Cliff or UB40 tunes. This conformance to the notion that in the tropics one can only hear calypso music seemed antiquated in the '80's in films like Cocktail and Weekend at Bernie's. The acting in Six Days Seven Nights was poor--even Ford seemed at a loss for how to acceptably deliver his characters forced lines--and the situations that Heche and Ford ran into turned this from merely a bad film into a celluloid debacle of Ishtar standards. The fact that Browning could even conceive of a scene where a snake swims into Heche's pants that Ford ultimately has to fish out with his bare hands is frightening. The only reason I can see for Ford's commitment to this film, other than his $20 million price tag, was his desire to spend 4-6 months in the lush Hawaiian islands where Six Days Seven Nights was filmed; beyond that, though, there doesn't appear to be any rational explanation. Six Days Seven Nights wasn't just the name of this movie, it felt like it was the length of time it took to screen the picture as well.
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